


May the darkness within you find peace in the light

by mangabreadroll



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Side B takes place a little after the final scene in S2, Vanya Hargreeves (minor), a little Klaus-Vanya sibling moment, is back with a vengeance, mild description of substance abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:48:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25814566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mangabreadroll/pseuds/mangabreadroll
Summary: Two one-shots, where Klaus loses Ben in some form.Side A: The first time Klaus manages to shut out the ghosts, he shuts out Ben as well.Side B: Hours after losing one Ben, Klaus meets another in the flesh.*Spoilers for S2 finale*
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Comments: 4
Kudos: 55





	May the darkness within you find peace in the light

_“You know, I’m tired of seeing you wallow in self-defeat.”_

_“Then avert your gaze.”_

The screams were getting quieter now. He was going to make it.

Klaus groped for the bottle and shook out the remaining pills onto the palm of his hand.

“Klaus, _that’s enough_.”

The voice cut through his senses like hard sunlight cutting through the blinds in a dark, smoke-filled room. A few capsules slipped through the cracks between his fingers.

Ben’s face swam into view amongst the shifting pinks, yellows and blues of his vision.

_Go away, Ben_ , he wanted to say, why was he always such a buzzkill when it came to parties?, but instead he let out a giggle.

Oh, but Ben didn’t have that disappointed look on his face that he usually had whenever he came to crash one of his parties. He looked frightened.

“Klaus, you’re in bad shape. You have to stop _now_.”

Klaus blinked. He didn’t feel any different from how he usually did. In fact, he couldn’t really feel much at the moment, other than being way, way out of planet Earth. The sounds of people laughing around him sounded like he was hearing them through a really thick carpet, the guests were acting out a scene from his favourite romantic drama and his brain felt like cotton candy and – he could see a face now, beside Ben’s, the dark circles under her eyes and the bridge of her nose caving back into her face, whispering and pleading his name…

“Oh, _no_. No, no, no.” The colour was draining out of his vision, out of the fountain and the towers of red cordial. It was getting louder again, they were coming back. He held his hands to his ears. “Shut up!”

“ _Klaus -_ ”

He’d never heard Ben this distressed before. More faces were starting to appear behind him, blue smudges that made awful whimpering noises, faces that would later turn into bodies…

“ _Shut up_!” He crammed the pills into his mouth.

They tasted like fire and then they tasted like the toffee he and his siblings used to sneak back on the way back from missions. Ben was also calling his name. _Shut up_ , _Ben_ , he thought. _I need the ghosts to shut up_. He pounded at his head with the base of his palms so it could be quiet –

When he blinked his tears away, Ben’s face was inches from his. “You’re going to be fine, stop it, _please_.”

The other ghosts started to scream. He felt his head starting to split open. There were many times for Ben to be annoying, but this wasn’t one of them. “Don’t be stupid, Ben.”

He pawed the ground for the lost pills, found one lodged in the folds of his pants, and gulped that down. Colour burst to life in his vision. The blue faces exploded into blue flowing water that soaked his feet and sparkled as the sunlight hit its surface. Ben’s face became… smudged, there was no face there, like how he’d looked when Klaus popped his first pill. He didn’t like that.

He saw a bright yellow fruit smiling at him from where it floated in the water. He took a bite out of it.

The blue smudges turned into yellow smiley faces, and their mangled, misshapen bodies turned into brightly-coloured dresses and suits. Ben was wearing the suit he’d worn the day he died, with a splitting gash that stretched from his neck to his stomach, leading down to a void that seemed to suck out all the noise in his head. That wasn’t right. Klaus rubbed his eyes with his fruit-stained fingers, and waved his hands like he used to back when he thought it would shoo away the ghosts.

The party was over. There was no more screaming. He’d done it.

Klaus clapped with glee. It was the only sound in the silence of the room. “What’d I tell you, Ben-Ben? Suck it up!”

Ben sat further away from him now, almost blending into the shadows. He sat hunched over himself, his eyes closed.

“Ben?” he tried again.

When Klaus woke up the next morning with a sip from his flask, there were no ghosts, and there was no Ben.

* * *

_“He wanted me to tell you that he was too scared to go into the light. It wasn’t you that made him stay.”_

* * *

_“Your uncle Ben, he took down four of them at the same time.”_

Time travel was weird. It was the only thing Klaus could keep telling himself, the minute he met _him_. Suddenly he couldn’t really blame Five for murdering his way into a mid-life crisis at thirteen, with the powers that he had.

Ben was dead, right? He’d felt him – realised he’d felt him go, almost a day ago. And now he wasn’t.

And it wasn’t because the feeling of Ben’s physical presence - instead of the floaty, omnipresent presence he’d felt throughout half his life – was unfamiliar to him.

This Ben didn’t feel like his Ben.

A spinning wheel of statements went round his head before he started the conversation. “How was… not dying?”

Sparrow Academy Ben raised an eyebrow, confused.

“In our timeline,” Klaus coughed, searching for the right words. “The timeline where _you are my brother -_ ” The words came out more desperate than he intended, it happened and no amount of time travel could change that. “ – you died.”

“Your timeline me must have been a colossal wimp, then,” Ben said.

“How’d you become such a prick?” Klaus muttered, then back to Ben, “Yeah, you were. _Your_ timeline Dad didn’t make you read those dead-language, cult-y tomes in the middle of the night until you broke out in hives? Force you to eat that weird casserole so little Ben Jr. inside you wouldn't get hungry, that made you puke black goo for a week? Made you sleep on a pentagram to see if a different tentacle monster would pop out of you like some sick Kinder surprise?”

“He did,” Ben said firmly. “But Dad was very patient with me, and while my training was painful, I learned to get over it.”

“He was _patient_ with you?” Klaus forced out a laugh. He held his arms out in faux admiration. “Well, congratulations on becoming daddy’s boy, because Dad wouldn’t have ‘changed tactics’ if it wasn’t us who showed him the wonderful shitshow his normal parenting came out with.”

“I see why he decided not to adopt you happy few,” Ben sneered, the scar on the bridge of his nose appearing more jagged.

Klaus balled his fists, but he couldn’t bring himself to deck Ben upside the head.

Vanya took a cautious step forward. “Klaus, don’t fight him, That’s not –“

“Not our Ben.” Klaus made a swallowing sound, then continued, pacing towards Ben. “I can’t believe I was stupid enough to believe that all this while, sweet, voice of reason, sometimes a little annoying Ben was the least likely to turn out like Dad.” He stopped, cringing at Ben’s uniform. “Did Dad liking you more this time inspire you to be daddy’s little monster?” He nodded at the Sparrow siblings on the other side of the room. “I guess your new siblings turned out to be even bigger assholes so you had to play daddy to keep them in check?”

“My brothers and sisters pushed me to be the be the best version of myself,” Ben countered, his voice raised. Klaus remembered the other time he sounded like this was when he was berating him for going on one of his drug runs. “They didn’t hold back.” He frowned as he said this, but his tone returned steady. “But I’m thankful that I had them.”

“But you didn’t have me,” Klaus said bluntly.

“I can’t imagine you being my brother.” Ben shrugged. “You’ve got a lot of trouble letting it go. I’m sure you’d drag the whole family down with you.”

Klaus was quiet. His fists trembled.

“Klaus,” Vanya tried quietly, touching his shoulder. “Now’s not the time.”

“If you’re telling the truth, then Dad trained us well,” Ben’s tone softened slightly, almost in a consoling manner. “And maybe I owe it to you six that he learned not to make the same mistakes. And I came out stronger because of it.”

Reginald Hargreeves had considered that the early demise of Number Six was in some part due to his own miscalculations. So unlike the new six that he’d decided to raise, he’d decided to take a different approach with the number he’d failed – slower steps this time, more nurturing, more encouragement, all for building Number Six to live up to his name, until the day came when The Horror emerged from a room littered with the broken bodies of criminals, uniform drenched in blood and hair sticking to his forehead, with a bright smile on his face.

“I guess you could spend a few minutes with my siblings and see how much of an improvement they are over you,” he continued. “Before Dad kicks you out of the house.”

He nodded to the rest of them, and walked away.

“I’ll pass,” Klaus mumbled, putting on his hat.

Vanya gripped his arm firmly. “Our Ben was real.” She looked at him with the eyes that had watched him fade into the light. “Nothing changes that.”

“Actually it felt just like talking with our Ben,” Klaus said to the ground. “But if every conversation we had was an argument.”

Vanya nodded.

Before she pulled away, Klaus grabbed her shoulders. “He didn’t meet us. That’s why he’s such a prick. If you guys are planning something - " He took a shaky breath. “We need to kidnap him, or something, take him on a life-changing field trip with us, with me…”

It felt like Dave in 1961 again, begging him to believe in a future that would definitely change as soon as he talked about it. What did he care, time travel wasn’t his thing. “Or what do you think?” Klaus sighed. “You’re the expert on supervillains. No offence.”

Vanya put a hand over his, one of the few affectionate gestures she’d started showing her siblings after the incident in Dallas. “We’ll come back for him.”

Klaus nodded, blinking back the stinging in his eyes. “We’re coming back for him.”

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't expect to come out with a lot of theories and predictions for S3 as I was writing the second part of this and I sprinkled some of them throughout, let us discuss them pLeAse  
> I decided to run with the version where Reginald adopted a new set of kids instead of alternate versions of the original siblings, plus my winning prediction, the Hargreeves siblings take Sparrow!Ben on a life-changing field trip because he missed out on having siblings who actually care for him in this new timeline, you can pry this prediction out of my cold dead hands. 
> 
>   
> Thanks for reading!   
> It would really make my day if you could leave a comment! :D


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